Healthy relationships with others start with learning to love yourself first.
How many romantic comedy movies have you watched where person A meets person B and after some interpersonal struggle is surmounted, they make up and all is wonderful? Love has once again saved the day. The credits roll and you go home pining for someone like person B to come into your life and make you feel everything you just saw on screen. “Why can’t I have that?” you think to yourself. The truth is that love can indeed save the day, but you don’t actually need anyone else. The biggest love story of your life is learning to love yourself—despite all the challenges, disappointments, scars, and struggles—just as you are.
Dear Me, I love you. Sincerely, Me
It is true that no person is an island, and we all seek connection. But the real path to healthy connection with others is first to love yourself, to believe that you are worthy of love, that you are more than enough, and that you are a complete human being.
I learned this lesson the hard way. I am a hopeless romantic. I love love. And even though I often find romantic movies disappoint and unrealistic, I am still a sucker for them. I had a love story like the movies. Our love saved the day. The minister said, “I now declare you Wife and Wife,” and we rode off into the snowy Toronto sunset.
But in life, unlike the movies, that’s not where the story ends. Being in a relationship means choosing to love that person every day. So I did just that. I woke up and I loved her and I loved her. I did small things like offer a massage, cook breakfast, or make a cup of tea. I did the big things like set up a romantic tent in the middle of the living room and edit a movie of all our years together. I loved her so hard. I forgot to love me.
I told myself that I was easy going and I didn’t care what we did together even though we ended up spending most of the time doing the things she liked. I told myself I didn’t care that I wasn’t spending time to develop myself because I was taking care of my family. Nevertheless, the seed of resentment was planted and I started feeling like I was doing too much for her.
Know thyself
What about me? What about what I want? I took a moment to ponder and to my shock I had no clue. I didn’t know what I wanted because it had been so long since I asked myself that question that I had no answer.
Unsurprisingly, my marriage was beginning to be affected by my nascent feelings of jealousness and pettiness. I questioned the motives of her actions. When I brought this up she tried hard to step up her game, but nothing felt like enough. I would find fault or error in all she did and I ended up pushing her away. In truth, I felt unappreciated not because she wasn’t doing enough but because I no longer loved myself, so I couldn’t understand how she could love me. This was a harsh realisation for me to accept.
I sat with this knowledge: I don’t love myself anymore and I don’t feel worthy of love. How can someone love me, if I don’t love myself? I went to this dark place and I knew I needed to make changes; I knew I needed to move forward.
Learn to love yourself
“How do I fall in love with myself?” I asked myself. Well, how do you fall in love with anyone? You get to know them. So, I took myself on dates. I went rollerblading. I took a book, some tea, and a picnic blanket to the park. I went on strolls by the waterfront. I spent time with my guitar, and I wrote poems.
Little by little, day by day, I fell more and more in love with me. The more I read and wrote and did things out of my comfort zone, the prouder I felt of myself. This in turn, made my wife fall even more in love with me because I was brimming with confidence and positivity. I felt worthy of her love.
Dating myself made me realise that I was more than enough. I was worthy of my love and worthy of other people’s love. We all deserve our own love story with ourselves.
Are you ready to learn to love yourself? Join mental wellness workshops with Mental Muscle Mafia! The workshops provide a safe space to work on your emotional fitness in a small peer group setting, where friendships are founded on the pursuit of both emotional and physical wellbeing. Find your mental muscle buddy today!